Colonial

« You’re just a colonial, bloke. Without us, you’d be nobody. » said an English fellow. I was a Canadian living and working in England in the 70’s and was often mocked and bullied in this way. The English society was rigidly hieararchal.  My buddies, some working class blokes I’d met at the local pub were friendly and would always say ‘don’t mind him’ when someone would spout off .

This group I hung with were what might be termed ‘lower middle class’.  They commonly had some college education and office assistant level job.  They weren’t ‘posh’nor were they ‘common’.The rigid class system distinguished upper, middle and lower class. There didn’t seem to be much movement as position depended so much on your parents, their past, where you lived and the dialect of English you spoke. As a ‘colonial’ I was an ‘outsider’ , welcomed by some , disparaged by others. I was novel and appealing to a certain extent but if I crossed some secret law of class behaviour I was « corrected’.  « Bloody colonial. » 

I’d read some 80% or thereabouts of land in England was still owned  or controlled by some relative or ancestor of the Norman Conquerors of a thousand AD. 

Years later I was working as a doctor in a small town and this local woman approached me inviting me to a ‘party’ at her estate.  She said that ‘we’ve had a discussion about you and observed you this last year you’ve been here. We think you’d be a good addition to our social group. We’re all the right people and tend to make all the important decisions in the community together. You’d do well to join us, » she was rather pleased with herself.

I thanked her but stayed apart remembering how I’d  been rushed for several fraternities and remained aloof then too.. For a social person I’m really quite the loner. Today I most enjoy hanging out with my dog , going for walks and getting together with the girlfriend on weekends.  I have a few close friends and many acquaintances I hold fondly. I’m anxious to get close to people at my age. So many of my closest friends have died and divorces and betrayal has taken it’s toll on my trust and socialization. I feel rather raw perhaps as a nature of my work, sensitive to the ‘loudness’ of peoples emotions.  

I encounter people today who disparage me as a ‘radical’ politically but I’d characterize myself as middle of the road,  libertarian really. It’s ironic how those in their left or right bubbles believe they are in the middle.  It’s difficult being in a world where people argue constantly about two humped versus one humped camel. Frankly I don’t care much about camels.  

People often identify with the larger group to give their own meaningless insignificance value.  The family is brought into the tribe and the tribe the nation.  Now there’s the Globalist One World Order. They want everyone to identify with their latest totalitarianism.  I cringe.  So often I want to be left alone.  Often I feel even a bit paranoid as if  I’m targeted already by the Borg Like government burearocrat. If I don’t ‘conform’ I’m one of the  ‘enemy’.  

I  read Voltaire , « Patirotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings’.  Identification with the group and knowing right thing to say is fear and anxiety reducing.. 

There’s comfort and solace in being ‘in’ .  I so enjoyed reading Arendt on the ‘Banality of Evil’ after she’d seen the Nuremberg trials where everyone denied accounatability.  Robert Graves in the Golden Bough said that the choice of a king or chief was that he could be sacrificed while the group survived.  It’s like blaming the mind today as ‘he was of two minds’ and couldn’t focus whereas in the not so distant past it would be said ‘his heart wasn’t in it’.  I’m always reminded of my colleague who specialized in anal surgery. Asked why this rather than heart or brain or kidney, he replied, ‘I’ve done them all but when I could relieved a person’s constipation they were the happiest and most grateful. I get cards at Christmas from patients I saw 30 years ago ».  Not surprising we call people assholes when we’re not fond of them .

I must remember I’m loved by God and that first and foremost I must love what I am and have for so many people driving Honda’s wish they had Lamborghinie’s,  So many people poor wish to be rich.  There is never enough in this world.   reigns.The wise also warn that we should beware of what we wish for.

The Buddhist master describes the west as  suffering ‘spiritual consumerism’. It’s no surprise that addiction rules not just the gutter world but Wall Street and politics.

I’m reading David Baldacci’s the Calamity of Souls. It’s a story of a trial of a black man accused of killing white people in the south.  It’s set in the time of Rosa Parks.  

In the 70’s I eventually moved home to Canada.  I haven’t been called a ‘colonial’ in decades.  The feelings of shame have come and gone for other reasons.  Life is changing.  I still feel an outsider a lot. 

Shakespeare’s King Lear said, « So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues talk of court news , and we’ll talk with them too - Who loses and who wins who’s in who’s out - and take upon ‘s the mystery of things as if we were god’s spies,’  

Abortion and Father's Day

Crossing Liffey River at HaPenny Bridge I realized that my life would have been so different were it not for the ME-DIA.  That information God owned by a few billionaire politicals intent on frightening me and misrepresenting reality for personal gain.
It was Father’s Day and I was grieving abortion.  Remembering begging her in tears not to kill our baby.  All the while she laughed and said ‘it’s my body”.  She’d been concerned that it would affect her appearance. It would interfere with her career.  I begged, cajoled promised and then she was angry. Even more angry when after I didn’t return her calls.   I’ve known no greater Hate Crime in my own life. There’s never been Hague case though.
 I’m not a bad guy. Just one of millions whose world exploded.  I remember finding she’d cut off the tip of the condom.  She told me she was taking birth control. Then there was the marriage and I begged her for children.  Wanted so badly for family. She called me ‘daddy’ and I knew she never wanted to be a woman.  It was so good to be a girl.  The ME-Dia says Women are out and Girls are in.  My mother was like nothing in Sex and the City.  My mother may as well have been a kazoo player too. She was married to my father, and my  family as persecuted as Paraquay.  Unfashionable unmentionables,  
I never showed up in the Media.  I played kazoo when everyone was playing guitar. There was no sexy hot kazoo band where the girls swooned.  The cameras would have been there and even reporters.  But somewhere in the cigar filled rooms where old men and old women wrote the world, kazoo players were out and guitars were in.  I watched my friend’s banjo get sidelined as well.
I'd  listen to  unnamed band and like the music.  Before they were remixed. Street musicians attracted me.  Loners. Outsiders.
Every once in a while I’d cheer because a lacrosse game would be covered.  Maybe the darts scores would make the news.  Something that would change the soccer monopoly. A woman’s game, perhaps.  Sometimes badminton would be covered. I’d envision revolution but it was all so quickly silenced. Basketball would come back on the next night, maybe a hockey game, then more soccer.  They called it football in America.  They called it multicultural, praised diversity and said we had such choice.  A ball is still a ball whether round, oblong or oblique  
It was all about the bets.  Gamblers had their preferences.  Curling wasn’t the scene in Macao or Los Vegas. The ME-Dia men fancied themselves as blood sports sorts.  Extreme combat was more important than spelling bees.
That day on HaPenny Bridge though, I realized they weren’t. Not in the grand scheme of things.  Not where it mattered.  A poetry contest among the Inuit was just as important as France's Napoleon and Englands’ Waterloo.  Regina Saskatoon wasn’t ever in the news not because it was somehow less than but just because it wasn’t where the ME-dia communication gambling cigar smoking whiskey drinking effetes lived.  These cowards didn’t have their own lives. They survived on living through ours.
The most important things about my life had never been shared on the news.  Intimacies and secrets and the sorrow of abortion. They were the tears at a celebration. And I thought of all the men I knew who’d lost their children.  Good sorts of men, more than 50%.  All portrayed as ogres and evil.  Like the Germans who fought in a war with the Allies but stopped one Christmas their Me-dia game of us and them to play instead a game of soccer out in that no man’s land.  ME-Dia kept that moment secret for decades. It only sneaked out one day like a burst of cello at a rock and roll concert.
ME-Dia sorts are just loud.  They’re often drinking and doing drugs and high on their own fallacious success, their killing the stocks and their passing dominance.  Quaint little cowards just like the rest of us but with News Rooms, and Television Studios and Reuters and fixed newspapers and rigged outlets. " There’s no room for original.”  they say,  " We’d rather have another star that looks like our last one so we can gauge in focus groups what the return will be on our financial investment,”  The world has been in a news and entertainment loop for decades.
Education returns less than entertainment.  Give them cake. Give them pot.  Give them large arenas with blood sports.  The bigger the better, the louder the richer.
And days of celebrations.  Where always there are those who cry. Like all those fathers whose sons and daughters have died in all those countless wars and all that needless crime.  Father’s day is the worst day of the year.  I miss my own Dad now dead and remember her proud and haughty look as she told she’d had the abortion and wanted me to be there to ‘support her’ .
And to this day I’ve paid a fortune in taxes to support families and children. I’ve helped countless fathers with their futures knowing I have none of my own. I’ve carried on playing kazoo Today I know I’m not alone.  Today I know that the ME-Dia gods are fallible.  They miss countless stories and long ago stopped getting it right.  They’re spreading the war. They’re creating the destruction. They are the cause.  Not because the people want to know.  But because a few old men and women want to win in casinos and can’t help but let the truth be told.  So information is reduced to sports. And it doesn’t matter how many cowboys are playing quoits, it’s just not going to covered any more than square dancing no matter how many are doing it.
At every celebration there are those crying like I am.  We’re too grey and messy for the black and whites. I’m not so angry with her.  My rage, or sadness, is directed more at them. Like an Amenian or Rwandan who survived a holocaust but finds their number not on the holocaust hit parade this life time.  It’s like South America that’s all but forgotten by the BBC.  It’s like she didn’t know what she was doing.  Following some program she never could be real.  And their are times when I walk among the dead like the only living, feeling like I am the last sentient among the shiny smiling robots.  But I’m not alone.
The ME-dia died long ago and life moved on. The multi faceted diamond in the rough was polished by the light.
It was a fleeting thought. I remember I was crossing Liffey River on HaPenny Bridge.  I’m surprised that I remember it.  The noise of competing programs, they are called programs, we are being programmed, usually drowns out the wee small voice. It was the wee small voice.  That’s what it’s called for a reason.  It’s still there.  Like the idea of you.  A dead baby in a stainless steel sink.